Were it not for the bags of destroyed hornets nests in the corner, you could be forgiven for confusing Peter Davies’ office with the set of a TV detective show. Maps dotted with Post-it notes cover the wall in the repurposed hotel suite just off the M20 in Kent. There is no natural light: the only window looks down on an atrium below, and is partly obscured by a flip chart with the plan for the day. From here, Davies and his team run the national command centre for holding back the Asian hornet, an invasive species that preys on honeybees and other pollinators.
“In effect, I’m the incident commander to tackle the hornet. We have a forward operating base at the hotel so we can get anywhere in Kent quickly, because that’s where we’ve had the most incursions,” he says.
Identifiable by its dark abdomen and yellow legs, the predatory wasp is native to south-east Asia and is spreading rapidly in Europe. A single female is believed to have arrived in Bordeaux in 2004 on a shipment of pottery from China, and went largely unnoticed until its spread was impossible to control. Today, there are an estimated half a million nests in France, with the numbers continuing to rise. Each nest can work its way through 11kg of insects in a single season, putting further strain on beleaguered native pollinators.
So far, Davies and the team at the Animal and Plant Health Agency (Apha) are keeping them at bay. Sixty-four nests have been found so far this season, a record for this point in the year, and probably a product of the warm spring and summer that have boosted the numbers of wasps and other flying insects. But Asian hornets are not yet establishing year-round breeding populations in the UK. DNA testing from 2024 showed that just three of the 24 nests found last year were from overwintering females.
This autumn – the crucial time of the year for tracking down Asian hornet nests before they produce fertilised females – the team are trialling the use of tiny trackers that attach to the insects to find and destroy nests. Unlike their native equivalents, the invasive insects make two nests a year. The second is especially hard to spot: they are typically constructed high in the canopy of trees and often obscured by leaves. Without technology, it can sometimes take Davies and his team several days to locate nests after a confirmed Asian hornet sighting. The trackers can help them find nests within an hour.
To demonstrate its use, we head to a park in Ashford. Under an oak tree, a sickly sweet purple liquid had been used to bait suspected Asian hornets that were reported by a beekeeper. Dan Etheridge, a regional inspector from the National Bee Unit, had captured one of the invasive insects to fit with a tracker.
Buzzing ferociously in a net, the female Asian hornet is encouraged into a plastic tube. Etheridge uses another tool to grab her by the abdomen, carefully avoiding her yellow legs and wings, before wrapping a tiny transmitter around her body, which looks like an extra-thin slice of tinsel.
“What we would do now is release her into a mini tent to make sure she can move freely and fly. Then she’ll head off,” says Etheridge.
The team had already tracked down the nest before we arrived, just a short drive from the park.
High in a tree, a beach ball-sized nest sways in the wind. Most of it is obscured from sight by branches and leaves. The highest they have found is 34 metres, the team say, putting them out of the reach even of a cherrypicker. Tomorrow, this one will be exterminated – killing the insects before they have a chance to release hundreds of fertilised females into the environment.
“If we came back in a week, that nest could have doubled in size,” says Davies. “They need lots of protein. As the nest gets bigger, they have more and more young. They need more and more protein to feed those young. The worst time for honeybees is a day like today. It’s not very warm, the weather’s quite poor. You’ve hardly seen an insect today – yet, if you went to a beehive … it’s like going to the supermarket. The Asian hornets just know it’s full of food,” he says.
The team say thousands of submissions from members of the public through the Asian Hornet Watch app allow them to rapidly respond to reports. The Asian hornets have popped up around the country, often near ports. Davies has found them hibernating in a pallet of wine and lurking in a delivery of shallots from France. Some fly across from Belgium and France. But the team are adamant they are holding them back so far.
“The public are seeing more Asian hornets around. So there is an assumption or a feeling that they must be established, but that isn’t the case,” says Tracy Wilson, Apha’s head of operational delivery. “There are some surviving – but they’re not thriving in the UK, and we continue with eradication,” she says.
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